When did man become truly modern? Is there a seminal moment in our history when we can say 'this is the moment when we became modern'. I believe there is. It is the moment when man (and woman) strolled down the long supermarket aisles and picked strawberries. But this is no ordinary strawberry picking. Oh no, our ancestors may have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found in the bush in summer, viewing them as the gifts from a munificent creator, but we became modern when we gave up waiting for sporadic and capricious gifts from above and instead sought immediate and year round strawberries - in the supermarket. Walk down any supermarket today at any time of the year and you will find strawberries. They journey from Israel in midwinter, from Morocco in February, from Spain in spring, from Holland in early summer, from England in August and from San Diego between September till Christmas. All year round strawberries. No longer do we allow the tilt of the earths axis to decide what we can or cannot eat. Of course strawberries are just one example of our emancipation from the fetters of seasons and climate. Thanks to the genius of logistical science the seasons no longer exist - when it comes to food anyway. But there is, for me, a worrying side affect of our new-fangled modernity.
If you had lived 200 years ago the chances are you would know where your food came from. You would be intimately connected with its providence. Your bread no doubt would have been freshly baked by Mr Crumpet the baker. The cheese you ate would come from the Cheddar farms in Wiltshire. Your beef stew courtesy of the cattle belonging to ole farmer Henry and his wise chickens and nagging missus. Strawberries (only available in July, August) from the fields of East Sussex. Fish from the burgeoning fisheries of the North Sea. The handful of exotic items you consumed would have come from suitably exotic places: tea from Darjeeling and Ceylon, pepper and nutmeg from the Spice Islands of Banda off the coast of Indonesia, coffee from Arabia, wine from Bordeaux and if you were wealthy, Caviar from Sturgeon eggs caught in the freezing arctic waters of the Russian empire.
And today? Today the average supermarket has 20,000 produce. You'd be lucky if you knew where half-a-dozen of these came from. Let's take Tuna for example. Your Tuna comes from the Indian ocean waters off the Maldives. There it is caught by illiterate skinny Indians, hauled out of the water impaled on huge hooks and weighing 50kg's, clubbed to death until the water on deck turns red, lungs and bladders removed, gutted, sliced and diced into cubes and processed in factories in the Maldives. There they are packaged in Sainsbury's own brand plastic wrap, loaded into the cargo section of a Boeing 747 under aisle seats 34-45 headed for England. Finally, it is taken to the central processing warehouse near Birmingham from where great articulated lorries carry your Tuna steaks into the night, to every corner of the British Isles while you sleep, to your local Sainsbury's store. All within 48 hours. 48 hours ago that Tuna was happily swimming away in the warm blue waters of the Indian ocean...now it is seal-wrapped in the 'fish and seafood section' of a Sainsbury's in leaden and cold skied Middlesex. Welcome to modern life.
So what is my point? Why am I describing to you this wonderfully complex feat of logistics? Do you not see? We, in the West, no longer have any idea where our food comes from and how it got here. We cannot even begin to contemplate the human story that unfolds like a comic strip behind the food that finds itself on our plates. But most importantly of all, and this is the point I am driving at, we have lost control. We assume the food will always be there. We assume there will always be bread and milk and eggs in the supermarket in the morning. We have traded bewildering choice for control. But what if things were to break down? What if the logistics system that brings our food to us, from all over the globe, collapsed? - from a major catastrophe perhaps: war, natural disaster, financial meltdown, alien invasion, nuclear holocaust. Would we starve? Would we Londoner's be reduced to nibbling away at tree barks or foraging for scraps of edible plant matter in Hyde Park?
You have no idea how precarious your existence is. Your entire lives are dependent on the workings of electronic machines, embedded in walls, handing out wads of paper - for the correct password. The card swiping machine in your local supermarket stands between you and your morning croissant and newspaper. The bank clerk stands between the crediting of your salary to your bank account and pecuniary. The delivery of that croissant depends on an army of human robot workers; most of whom are miserable and feel they are nothing but part of a soulless logistical network - which they are. And the sublime irony of modern life? For choice, for selection, for bewildering variety - we gave up control and freedom and have subjugated an army of humans to drudgery and inertness.
Contrast this with the peoples living in the Hunza valley in northern Pakistan. Yes, there choices are limited. Yes, they don't have thirty different breakfast cereals to choose from.Yes, they rarely eat Tuna. Yet, they don't have to suffer the ignominies of standing in front of a cheese counter trying to make an impossible decision. They are the few people left who know where their rice, bread and corn came from. The rice grows in fields in the Punjab and the wheat and corn they grow themselves on terraced fields. The pears and peaches they grab off the trees and as for Coca Cola and Sprite - who needs such calorie-laden americanisms when you have tea and fresh sparkling mountain mineral water! And most importantly of all, they don't live lives of mindless drudgery.
But does it not scare you? To know that you no longer have control over basic things like your food source? That your entire life is dependent on the efficient workings of banks, ATM's, logistics, crude oil, electricity, gas, share prices, and political stability in the Maldives. Politican instability in Maldives = no Tuna. Welcome to the modern world. I hope this has been food for thought.
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